Dale Wasserman

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Dale Wasserman (born 1917) is a prolific writer of drama.

Contents

[edit] Biography

"I was born. That seems fairly certain, but where or when less so, since I could not boast a birth certificate. By profession I’d describe myself as a Showbiz Hobo, having made the jump from riding the rails to theatre pro at the age of 19. I’ve been a stage manager, lighting designer, producer and director. At the age of 33, in the midst of directing an unspeakable Broadway musical, I walked, feeling that I couldn’t possibly write worse than the stuff I was directing. Writing was difficult due to an almost total lack of education. In my years of jumping freights, though, I did a heap of reading, ‘borrowing’ two books at a time from small town libraries, returning them to another library in a town further down the line, and hooking two more. (It’s possible that single-handed I brought the Dewey Decimal System to its knees.)

"I succeeded as a writer by lucking into the Golden Age of Television and thereafter segued into stage plays and movies. I have written around fifty works for TV, some two dozen stage plays and musicals and fifteen feature films. For a time I occupied an executive suite at MGM as a producer-writer. Upon being sprung, I wrote the stage adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest which flies lustily to this very day…" [1]

A product of the road and a raffish background, he claims neither academic discipline nor training.

Dale Wasserman was born in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and has worked in various aspects of theatre since the age of nineteen. His formal education ended after one year of high school in Los Angeles. It was there that he started as a self-taught lighting designer, director and producer, starting with musical impresario Sol Hurok as stage managerr and lighting design and for the Katherine Dunham Company, where he invented lighting patterns imitated later in other dance companies. In addition to U.S. cities, he has produced and directed abroad in places such as London and Paris. It was in the middle of directing a Broadway musical—which, out of persistent revulsion, Mr. Wasserman refuses to name—that he abruptly walked out, feeling he "couldn't possibly write worse than the stuff [he] was directing" and left his previous occupations to become a writer. "Every other function was interpretive; only the writer was primary." In this he has succeeded enormously.

Matinee Theatre, the television anthology which presented his first play, Elisha and the Long Knives, received a collective Emmy for the plays it produced in 1955, the year that Elisha and the Long Knives was telecast on that series (it had originally been shown in 1954, on Kraft Television Theatre, another anthology. Wasserman wrote some thirty more television dramas, making him one of the better known writers in the Golden Age of Television. Two of his stage plays predominate: Man of La Mancha and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, whose stagings place him among the most produced American playwrights worldwide. Man of La Mancha ran for five years on Broadway and continues worldwide in more than thirty languages. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ran for six years in San Francisco and has had extensive engagements in Chicago, New York, Boston and other U.S. cities. Foreign productions have appeared in Paris, Mexico, Sweden, Argentina, Belgium, and Japan.

Some insight into Wasserman's inner workings may be found in his work Man of La Mancha. "I wrote Man of La Mancha because I believed in it. It is my most personal play," he said in an interview. [2] He felt drawn to the author of the original novel Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes, who led a life that Wasserman calls a "catalogue of catastrophe", but was able to produce one of the world's most memorable stories. Perhaps he holds with the words of his Don Quixote: "I hope to add some measure of grace to the world. . . . Whether I win or lose does not matter, only that I follow the quest".

Reclusive by nature, he and his wife, Martha Nelly Garza, make their home in Arizona ("because it's the one State which refuses to adopt Daylight Saving Time.").

[edit] Works

His protagonists are a bit like Wasserman himself: raffish rebels, fiercely independent fools—poets, madmen and misfits—societal outcasts who defy authority and “tilt at windmills”, reluctant heroes (sometimes anti-heroes), who are called upon to make some extraordinary sacrifice in order to protect or preserve their personal freedom or that of others.

[edit] Plays

[edit] Recent (2000-)

  • 2001 How I Saved the Whole Damn World — A sailor on a drunken spree welds items from a junkyard into the mast of his ship. A plane flying overhead explodes and presto! an all-powerful weapon is born, and willy-nilly there is peace on earth. This comedy is about people so dazed with the new technologies they no longer know what to believe and, as a consequence, will believe anything.
  • Boy On Blacktop Road — An investigation takes place related to the arrival and subsequent disappearance of a young boy.

The latter two plays comprise the World Premiere of Open Secrets which opened In June of 2006 at the Rubicon Theatre Company in Ventura, California.

[edit] Musical theatre

[edit] Screenwriter Credits

Although Wasserman adapted Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for the American stage in 1963, his playscript was not used as the basis for the celebrated 1975 film starring Jack Nicholson, and Wasserman did not write the movie screenplay.

[edit] Television Writing Credits

More than fifty, mostly in the Golden Age of Television.

  • 1947 Kraft Television Theatre aka Kraft Mystery Theatre aka Kraft Theatre
  • 1948 Studio One aka Westinghouse Studio One
  • 1953 Kraft Television Theatre aka Ponds Theater
  • 1955 Matinee Theatre — "Elisha and the Long Knives"
  • 1955 Matinee Theatre — Fiddlin' Man, "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg", "The Milwaukee Rocket"
  • 1956 Climax!... aka Climax Mystery Theater—"The Fog" (no relation to the John Carpenter film or its recent remake)
  • 1956 The Alcoa Hour — "Long After Summer"
  • 1957 The O. Henry Playhouse — "The Gentle Grafter"
  • 1959 The DuPont Show of the Month. I, Don Quixote (TV Episode)
  • 1960 The Citadel (adaptation).
  • 1960 Armstrong Circle Theatre — Engineer of Death: The Eichmann Story
  • 1961 The DuPont Show of The Month: The Lincoln Murder Case (Wasserman received his only Emmy nomination for this television play, but did not win)
  • 1961 The Power and the Glory (some sources claim that director Marc Daniels won an Emmy for this, but this is not verified either by the Emmy Awards website or the Internet Movie Database)
  • 1962 G.E. True — "Circle of Death "
  • 1963 The Richard Boone Show (NBC) — "Stranger". At night, on a coastal road, a boy is nearly hit by a car. The car's passengers, stopping to see if the boy is all right, are disturbed by his strange behavior. See Boy On Blacktop Road above.
  • 1967 Long After Summer aka Boy Meets Girl
  • Perchance to Dream
  • Aboard the Flying Swan (based on Stanley Wolpert's book)

[edit] Book

[edit] Activities

  • Founding Member and Trustee of The Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center.
  • Founded and Artistic Director of the Midwest Playwrights Laboratory, which encompasses twelve states in its program and awards fellowships and production to ten playwrights yearly.

[edit] Awards

"As to awards, I have received the usual quota of Emmys [Wasserman is mistaken here; according to the Emmy Awards website [3], he received only one Emmy nomination], Tonys, Ellys and Robbys and, for all I know, Kaspars and Hausers. I’m unsure of the number because I don’t attend awards ceremonies and so receive the knick-knacks by mail if at all. Ah, yes, one exception: when the University of Wisconsin offered an Honorary Doctorate, I did appear in cap and gown to address the audience in the football stadium at Madison, because a scant quarter-mile from where I was being Doctored, I had hopped my first freight at the age of 12. Irony should not be wasted."

Writers Guild of America Award

  • 1959 Television Anthology, More Than a Half Hour: Winner--I, Don Quixote (episode of DuPont Show of the Month)

Tony award

  • 1966 Musical: Winner—Man of La Mancha. Book by Dale Wasserman, music by Mitch Leigh, lyrics by Joe Darion. Produced by Albert W. Selden and Hal James

Three honorary degrees, including:

  • 1980 University of Wisconsin — Madison, L.H.D.

[edit] Quotes

The Duke: Why are you poets so fascinated with madmen?
Cervantes: I suppose . . . We have much in common.
Duke: You both turn your backs on life.
Cervantes: We both select from life what pleases us.
— Man of La Mancha

[edit] References

The Impossible Musical, by Dale Wasserman

[edit] External links

Languages